For this week’s blog assignment we are looking at design systems.
I chose to begin by looking at Google’s material design system. This system is packed with information. Some things I focused on was their emphasis on accessible design, adaptive design, and interaction states. I appreciated them saying that accessible design is not at odds with expressive design, I agree. The material design system recognizes that products need to work in a variety of different devices, so components easily adapt for designers- cool. I think the focus of interactive states was interesting. It’s clear using a product with interactivity how that increases the intuitiveness of using that product.
The second design system I looked at was Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. This felt very similar to material design; they seem to agree on many principles of UX design. Some interesting take aways from this site included: embrace simplicity, ensure that buttons clearly communicate their purpose, and to replace colloquial expressions with direct plain language.
The third design system I looked at was Mailchimps. This system was a lot more straight forward. It was more a collection of the components they used to build their site rather than an extensive course in UX design like Google and Apple’s systems. Maybe kind of interesting, their brand just has 2 typefaces, doesn’t apply rounded corners to their data visualization, and uh.. name their colors after fruit.